The invention is related to the field of intelligent data searching and retrieval.
Existing approaches for leveraging information sources require a user to explicitly query different subs-system individually, manually filtering and sorting through results to apply the user's personal assessment of relevance based on the user's current work context. This process is very time intensive, repetitive and prone to error, because often a correct piece of information is not discovered because of incorrect input. This can result in information not being found or information being found which despite its apparent relevance is in fact not useful. Existing processes also require a user to explicitly switch contexts from their current workflow task to an information retrieval task and then back—repetitively.